It’s far more than a lick of paint. Taking on a doer-upper is complicated and time-consuming, often stretching your problem-solving skills and decision-making (how many configurations of bathroom tiles can one person deliberate?) to unprecedented limits.
Yet renovating a property from scratch also means the opportunity to create the home of your dreams. Want a high-tech office? Go for it. Fancy an open-plan kitchen/dining space? It’s yours. En suites in every bedroom – why not?
With Zoopla, the property website, declaring that the housing market is “on track for its busiest year since the global financial crisis”, there is a boom in buyers keen to move, but also, after spending so much time in our own four walls, a desire to create a home that ticks every box.
Tom Greenacre, managing director at Purplebricks, the online estate agency, agrees: “After lockdown, a lot of people are rethinking what they want from their home. ‘Project properties’ are particularly popular, and we’ve seen a big increase in demand for older houses that need renovation work.”
What’s more, if you opt for a wreck, or a place stuck in a time warp, it’s likely you’ll get it for a decent price. Any improvements will only make it more desirable and add value – but make sure you are thorough when researching the basics. One friend of mine bought a dilapidated 18th-century cottage from auction only to find the dry rot was so bad, a hard shove to a wall brought half of it crumbling down. It was a pricey wake-up call.
Like most dreams, it helps to broaden your mind. Think outside the box and contemplate the wilder possibilities. There is big potential in transforming a decrepit Victorian terrace, or even a disused school, church, barn, railway station… I recently heard about one family who turned a tumbledown pigsty into a stylish bolthole.
And perhaps now is exactly the right time to be daring! After the past 16 months of being forced to rethink how we live, the idea of transforming a tatty ruin into a gorgeous home has never been more appealing.
Peter Selencky and Marilyn Selencky, Peak District
‘We did consider demolishing it but renovation was more cost-effective, and it meant a lower carbon footprint’
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